write me well

Tag: struggle

  • New Year, Old Feels 

    I am usually not a big January fan – I once wrote here that “grim is a rather nice word for January”. But this year I was here for it.

    Fall felt long and hard and exhausting, the way life can be sometimes. When January arrived, I was ready to shove all of the emotions and struggles of the past four months into a box right next to our Christmas decorations and move right along.  

    The Christmas decorations I knocked out in a single morning, a simple task aside from getting so increasingly annoyed at how long it was taking me to remove the lights from our Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree that I just threw the thing out on our deck to deal with later. (I eventually aggressively stripped the lights by spinning the tree itself like a reverse Fruit Roll Up, pine needles flying and Kevin watching in horrified curiosity from inside.)

    The emotions and struggles? Not so easy. Life has no regard for seasons and will continue to put you through the wringer at its leisure, and the only course of action is to decide what to do with the time that is given us (I see you Gandalf). Sure, The White Wizard was talking more about the impending end of Middle Earth (and Tolkien was talking about the horrors of a world war), but the statement rings no less true in the context of each of our tiny little lives, wherever they may be.  

    Sometimes, life is just real hard. You can be surrounded by people you love, life can seem super simple and settled, there can be no tangible thing to hone in on as the Cause of All This Stress, and stressful it will be. You will still have to wake up each morning, find a thing that will motivate you to get out of your bed, and choose to give the whole racket a go. Add on that the state of the world has been doing THE MOST to destroy the ability to “give it a go” on a daily basis, and fuck, bro, that is just really tough to do. 

    So, despite knowing full well this is the way of the world, what did I decide to do at the beginning of January? I tried to pack away all those autumnal struggles with some New Years Intentions.  

    I called them intentions, because as a deeply grayscale person in a society that’s out here acting like everything is black and white, resolutions are far too resolute for my own comfort. But regardless of what I called them, given my mindset, writing down any long-term optmistic intentions seemed a bold-ass strategy for tackling my emotional exhaustion, new year or no.

    BOLDER STILL, the more I thought about them, and about what to write for my first post of the year, I decided to share them here.  

    Because the truth is this: the stupidest, tiniest little attempt at developing who you are as a person or the things that surround you? For me? That is just one of those things that never ceases to have the capacity to motivate me to get out of my bed. I don’t care if it is THE lamest cliche on the earth. An itemized list of things to aim for? SIGN ME UP.

    So, copied directly from a brand new notebook (because where else would I have written them), I give you my intentions for the hot mess that very well may be the year 2025: 

    1. Write more! So much more. Would love to start a new project. 
    1. Add something new to my life routine. Who knows what this will be. Some ideas: Sewing. Knitting. Skating?? Language learning. DIY-ing. Something…musical? 
        1. Reduce sugar intake. Basically, stop buying a weekly dessert item. 
        1. Paint something (or multiple somethings!!) in this house. 
        1. Find something that makes me appreciate my amazing silly body. Some kind of movement. It has done a fantastic job of getting me this far. I should probably return the favor. 
        1. Be a better communicator. Stop stewing. Share your thoughts. Even when they are scary or feel dumb. 
        1. Narrow career goal. Tough to do with a sort of unknown long-term (i.e. potentially moving to Europe), but at least figure out some over-arching goals. 
        1. Be okay with prioritizing small beauty and finding ways to bring it into every aspect of my life. 

        Will I actually do any of these things? It is entirely possible I will not. Did writing them down in a new notebook achieve anything? Not…not really. But stay with me here. 

        The horrific fires happening in LA have produced some harrowing imagery, and a particular story that came out of them has stuck with me. An artist had posted a video a few days before the fires started, a simple tour of the home she and her husband had created and the studio within it. The original intent of the video was just to record and celebrate the home they had created, and how much they loved it, and within days, it became a record of a place completely and unexpectedly destroyed by a fire. And they re-posted it in the aftermath with the added caption: “I wish I had known this would be the last week we would spend in our home.” 

        Sure, a home (especially a beautiful one) is a pretty universal thing to find joy in and be motivated by. Nobody looking at that video would be surprised that it brought that artist a huge amount of joy. But the tragic one-hundred-eighty-degree twist of that video just really drove home for me that we do not know what is going to be here tomorrow, what we will need to find next week to get us through the tough moments.

        It doesn’t matter what you need to focus on to get you through the day, what motivates you to get out of your bed. Do what works for you, take the video of your house, appreciate your silly little body, write more. In whatever way makes the most sense, decide what to do with the time that is given you.  

      • The Apocalyptic Thing About Change

        It’s been a good eight months since I last camped out at Foyles. Considering this was an almost weekly haunt of mine before the world imploded back in March, it’d be surreal sitting back down here even if it wasn’t in a room where everyone is distanced in their support bubbles, masked and sanitized and hopefully not infected. Needless to say, the then-and-now difference is hardly just linear.

        How different is my life since I last sat here? Very, but again, not just because of COVID. On a personal level, so much has changed in those eight months. I started a new job, my first outside of true retail (the word retail still hovers, linking me to the past decade of my work, but there are other words in my job title that will hopefully lead to the next decade). Not only that, but I’m a month into a part time masters’ course at Queen Mary University, something that still feels a little wild to me, if I’m honest. Less so now than it did in my second lecture at the end of September, when one really-not-that-silly question suddenly made me feel so deeply out of my depth that I spent the next seventy-two hours scrambling for an eject button. But still wild.

        I like to blame my whimsical Piscean flighty-ness when it comes to my love of the eject button (nothing says commitment issues like an inability to go on a second date nearly seven years after I left my last relationship), but the truth is I think it’s a pretty natural reaction. As much as you think it’s going to be a comfort to discover the thing you want to do with the rest of your life, it’s actually fucking terrifying. My genuine love of castles and Empress Matilda and medieval anything sustained me through the application process, the visions of my rural English future in the heritage industry suddenly validated when I was accepted into QMU’s Heritage Management program in July. But the reality of taking steps down a new professional path shook me more than I was prepared for, and I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking myself down (read: panic texting) since logging into that first virtual seminar.

        On an emotional level, the last eight months saw the last two-thirds of being in therapy. I had two major blows that kicked off that particular journey: first, the sudden death of my dad last July, and second, being forced to step down from my job at Regent Street. The death of a parent is traumatic by nature, and I wrote an essay about why my personal experience of it was such. But in a different way, my demotion shook me even further. For someone whose only adult concept of commitment was to work, suddenly being told you’re not nearly good enough at your job (whether true or not) makes you doubt what you’ve been doing with yourself for the last ten years. So the two experiences, which happened within two months of each other and were equally blindsiding, kind of, y’know, crushed me.

        Being a natural optimist, almost incapable of seeing “cons” and described on more than one occasion as sunshine personified (a favorite compliment I will remember until I shed my mortal coil), I did not handle being crushed particularly well. When my best friend suggested I look into therapy, I listened. Therapy looks different for everyone, and I worked through a goodly amount of my struggles from January to July of this year. I think more than anything the lasting benefits of knowing what it’s like to be heard and give yourself space make therapy for any amount of time worth pursuing.

        So, again still ignoring COVID, we have a career change, the discovery of a new life passion, a return to academia, and the finishing (a loose term) of therapy.

        Mixed in with the life-altering nature of the pandemic, there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and the personal stock-taking of privilege, being party to, and engaging and benefiting from systems of oppression and learning how to become an ally. Of expanding my awareness beyond the borders of these personal things that have happened to me in the past eight months and processing the experiences of others.

        I remember posting about Ahmaud Arbery back in March, making my first calls to a DA office to leave a voicemail, and being terrified of doing it “wrong”, and almost letting that fear stop me from talking about it. Fast forward to Breonna Taylor. To George Floyd. To it becoming belatedly apparent that staying silent in the past was to be complicit, that to be “apolitical” is (and always has been) synonymous with “my life isn’t effected enough to care, and I don’t care that yours is”. What kinds of changes has this wrought in my life? Adding antiracist reading to my regular book stack. Educating myself on systemic racism, and diversifying my feed, my shopping, and my cultural consumption. Learning that you never stop learning, and that it is a privilege that my education in this subject is academic and not physical.

        And then, we have COVID.

        When I finally got the call that my Italian citizenship had gone through back in 2014, I spent the next few years hemming and hawing about actually making the move back to England. Those were the days before Brexit seemed remotely possible, so instead of being plagued by potential red tape, the primary case I made for staying in the states could be narrowed down to one thing and one thing only: the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

        Really? you ask, understandably judgemental of the fact that a plot that involved Keira Knightley and Steve Carell as a plausible romantic couple could make me feel anything other than bafflement. Yes, really. For those unfamiliar, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a black comedy that chronicles the last days of earth, after a final attempt to stop a meteor flying towards our home planet fails (…emphasis on the black in black comedy). Keira Knightley and Steve Carell live in the same apartment building, but they don’t meet until he happens upon her, crying on the fire escape, because she has just found out she missed her last chance to fly back to the UK to see her family before the world ends.

        Call me crazy, but that movie and that circumstance really fucked me up. I empathized with Keira Knightley’s character, because choosing to live across an ocean from most of the people you love does relinquish a certain degree of control you have over your life. Sure, it’s unlikely that if I lived in Philadelphia and needed to get home to my family under emergency circumstances, that I’d be able to do so on foot. But if it came down to it, physics wouldn’t stop me. You don’t need a plane (or a pilot, for that matter) to make that journey. If I moved to England, though? That was no longer true, and, ridiculous or no, that fact kept me stateside for years.

        Obviously, my feelings eventually changed. Not my feelings towards that fear – it’s still deeply rooted within me. But my practical side caught up with me, and egged on by the nagging dissatisfaction I had with my life back in California, I made the move to the UK in 2018. I figured the chances of an apocalypse that would somehow stop me from visiting home and seeing my family was too absurdly unlikely to sacrifice my dream.

        Writing this in October of 2020, I think I owe my past self an apology. COVID may not be the apocalypse, but as impossible as the possibility seemed then, we do now live in a world where any minute my ability to go home can suddenly be, well, disabled. More likely than not, it’d only be a temporary problem, but still. Talk about things you never saw coming. (Or did. But wrote off because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.)

        So, now, not ignoring COVID, it’s been a long eight months. A whole lot has happened and I am grateful that if nothing else, Foyles is still standing, and I’ve been able to return after all this time, in this unfamiliar world, to something familiar.

        Change has many guises and I don’t know that I have anything more philosophical to contribute to the discourse than that. But it would be remiss of me to sit in this café and not share the experience so as to commune even the slightest bit with that old life of mine. I’m pretty busy these days, whether with work or study or just existing, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try and be here a little more. Despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, writing brings me joy, and we can all use a little more joy, right?

        And while all that means in the context of this blog is that I’ll post a little more, I’m not sorry. As Carl would say, I will not apologize for art.

      • Buzzcuts, Crusades, & Not Needing No Man

        It’s a rainy June afternoon in London, which is exactly the sort of thing everyone spent all of last summer warning me about. And yeah, it’d be a little bit more beautiful if there was blue sky on my day off instead of clouds and a more-than-light drizzle, but the atmosphere of a summer rainstorm has its own sort of magic. It’s warm, and damp, and grey, and green, and saturated. If you’ve got the option to spend that kind of afternoon inside with a view, there are worse June days to be had.

        I have done a markedly poor job of adventuring this spring/summer, and I’m determined to fix this. I may not have any current plans regarding how to do so, but I mean, this time last month I hadn’t even booked the last-minute trip to Malta that I went on two weeks ago. I doubt I’m going to jet off anywhere in the next two weeks, but for now the fact that I COULD is satiating enough. Besides, Malta was glorious, four days of lying in eighty-degree sunshine listening to Lizzo and re-applying sunscreen every hour on the hour and one day of solo-touring Valetta as I sweat my bodyweight trekking from Instagram post to Instagram post. The thrill of it will carry me through several rainy afternoons to come.

        I will also make do with the residual historical passion left from plowing through two Crusader-era novels about Richard I during said holiday, and a renewed focus on creating and committing to a social calendar. Last night was a bizarrely solid step forward in both regards, spent catching up with someone from my UEA days at an art showing at circa 1720 The Jerusalem Tavern. It was an excellent night of discussing cathedral pilgrimages, a shared love of old buildings, and the magical aura of places like Winchester and York.

        Yesterday marked the expiration of the last drop of patience I had in the growing-out-my-hair process. That sort of patience is always in short supply in my life, because once you have buzzed your hair, anything longer is considered high maintenance. I was having a moment, though, the record-setting kind where for almost a whole WEEK I thought I might have the strength of spirit to have a slightly long, curly-haired pixie cut. To give up my preferred silvery buzzed cousin of a pixie in favor of something a little more approachable, more akin to cute than “don’t fuck with me”. But yet again, it was not to be. I walked by a barber shop on my way to kill an hour before meeting up with said friend and walked out with significantly less hair. And let me tell you, that cycle is some well-known, battle-scarred territory for me.

        My close friends know that I struggle a lot with the concept of looking feminine. I don’t mind not looking feminine, and in fact actively revel in wearing my hair in a way that most people would call striking and/or androgynous. But when you’ve hit age thirty and five years of being single, even the most confident woman has a moment of self-reflection that involves examining how she looks and acts, wondering if that one thing is the reason a partner has eluded her all these years. And as a woman that wears her hair shorter than almost all others, my hair cut is an easy target whenever my self-criticism rears its rude head.

        The genuine truth is that 99% of the time, I love how I look and I don’t give a shit if it’s not appealing to men. My style is one of my favorite things about me and I absolutely would not change a thing about it just to attract a guy. But it is also genuinely true that that 1% moment, the one where I suffer crippling self-doubt and feel like I’ll always be alone, is a real fucking doozy. I miss having a partner. It doesn’t matter how much I love myself; it’s really hard to admit that I’ve just gotta wait around for a guy that’s not put off or intimidated by or unattracted to a girl that chooses to look like me.

        What gets me through those 1% moments is realizing that I’m not waiting: I’m just otherwise occupied. I have the luxury of other things to focus on and pursue and get excited about on my own. While it’s a little frustrating that my hair regrowth rate seems to line up perfectly with the creep-in rate of my self-doubt, I’ve learned to live with it (and my hair). Men might not be a fan on the whole, but just today I caught eyes with a lovely woman in her forties shopping with her friend. They stopped me and told me they’d been watching me since I came into the store because my hair was so amazing, and the friend pulled out her phone to show me the short hairstyles she’d just been looking up because I’d inspired her so much.

        Having said all of that, you could argue that I’m leaning real hard into my haircut as being single-handedly responsible for my singledom. Which is entirely possible too.

        Except you’re wrong, because what’s NOT to love about a loud, charming 12th century English history nerd covered in tattoos that can dad-joke with the best of them? I am flawless and so is my haircut.